Best I Miss You When I Blink: Essays Quotes by Mary Laura Philpott

"We all keep certain phrases handy in our minds."

"I miss you when I blink. It captures the depths of my love."

"I miss you when I blink. I have felt it so many times in my life."

"I have lost so much sleep trying to figure out where to hide bodies."

"My name is Mary Laura, and I am addicted to getting things right."

"It’s an icicle, by the way. The perfect murder weapon."

"People blame their parents for their flaws and eccentricities all the time."

"My work ethic helped me earn my way into opportunities that changed my life."

"Entropy = disorder. Time progresses, entropy in the universe increases, things fall apart."

"It’s hard to believe you could be anyone else."

"I was defiantly, absurdly, the boss of myself."

"It feels good to be chosen for something, but making a life requires making some choices yourself, too."

"If the pattern persists long enough, it forges a circuit in your mind that becomes hardwired."

"It’s never really about the room or the blouse or the shoes."

"A writer, but not novels or journalism? Perfect!"

"I marveled at the title under my name: Writer."

"I graded this choice on courage and gave myself an A for bravery."

"I wanted to run right up to some final prize and touch it and hear a ding! for done."

"The nightly news became more frightening, not less."

"What if work is just a thing we do to distract ourselves from the fact that the world is falling apart?"

"I would always work in some capacity, I knew, but I needed to think about how."

"Being uncertain and unfinished might be unavoidable."

"The spontaneous existence of love where before there was none is the most insanely wondrous thing."

"The evolution of a relationship is not something you can entirely control."

"Marrying John did not make me a good person, or a successful person. But it did make me very happy."

"The beauty of having a real house, not an apartment, is that you can just open the back door and let the dogs out."

"We went to celebrate our daughter’s birthday in her kindergarten classroom."

"Having children made me wish for a time machine."

"Days with young children feel four hundred hours long, but years flash by in seconds."

"I couldn’t have predicted or understood how much the start of a baby’s life warps an adult’s perception of her own childhood."

"If I could just go back and forth. If it weren’t all or nothing."

"Every despair in the world comes down to this, she believes. Every joy, too, I say."

"The way a diapered newborn rump fits into a cupped palm? Perfection."

"I want to be a preschooler again and I want to be a retiree, both for a little while, now."

"The smell of a toddler’s clean neck—wondrous."

"A baby’s arrival gives us adults the closest thing we’ll ever get to magic."

"I wanted to see my name in print—proof that I was still alive."

"I’ll never forget that last big volunteer gig: chairing the elementary school fundraiser."

"I got to pick up the phone one last time and call a bright-eyed mother of a kindergartner."

"I acted as if everything was normal. Just keep walking. There’s nothing to panic about."

"I took all those fertility drugs and made this poor baby live in my stupid body that’s not even safe."

"I can’t stand the idea of standing out as a gauche American."

"I had not prepared for this trip adequately."

"You can’t just assume that because you’ve reached a particular level in the game of life, you immediately fit in with those who have been there much longer."
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"If you are an ungrateful bitch, then you’re an ungrateful bitch whether somebody else thinks you are or not. The ship of bitchy ingratitude has sailed, so why not climb on board and sail it somewhere interesting?"

"The horizon of needs and wants never actually gets closer; it’s an illusion, a trick. We can always want more. We can always perceive some need."

"Sometimes a change of scenery had helped me see myself as a new character; sometimes it hadn’t."

"I craved nothingness—no agenda, no chatter. Just blessed silence."

"But didn’t the very fact that life was more complicated now mean we had more to talk about, not less?"

"Existential spending doesn’t really cure anything, but it’s an enjoyable—if expensive—way to dilly-dally on the way to doing what you really have to do."

"That’s what people do. But you have to overcome confirmation bias in order to do that. You have to be willing to call something wrong, to say something feels bad."

"I often thought, Shit, what right do I have to feel this way? It’s so stupid."

"It’s an anthropomorphized view, certainly, but everything he describes has at least some basis in scientific fact."

"The more you have, the more you have to lose, which means the further you get along in life, as people and places and things accumulate, the greater risk you’re taking just walking around every day."

"If figuring out what step to take next meant we immediately had to figure out every step afterward, too, then taking the next step would be impossible."

"Breaking the news to the kids that our family would be moving away from the only place they’d ever called home gave me a new respect for my mother and all the times she had to do the same thing for me."

"I often had days that spring when I thought, What the hell are we doing?"

"I held on to that thought as I watched hulking men in matching blue shirts wrap protective plastic around our kitchen table, our sofa, and our mattresses and load them into the moving truck."

"When you move, you take more than just your stuff with you. You take yourself."

"Sometimes we woke up at 6:30 a.m. to the sound of buzz saws in our kitchen."

"I read somewhere that children need to know they can rely on some things to stay the same, even when a big transition comes along."

"The emphasis on the things themselves suggests that the holiday’s success or failure hinges on the rightness of the gifts."

"I think it’s about longing: to be taken care of, to let someone else do at least part of the planning."

"I stood in the middle of a forest and silent-screamed every profane word I know, which is a lot of bad words."

"The higher up the ranks you go, the greater accountability you have on your shoulders."

"Some days, I want to spend an afternoon online looking at pictures of dogs with eyebrows, and I don’t want to have to report it to anyone."

"We want the best for our children, even if we don’t agree on what "the best" is or how to help them get it."

"It takes courage to quit something, but often you get that courage back with dividends."

"Deciding what you won’t have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have."